XXV
There was a moment’s horrible silence in which the white-faced clock was drowned, or so it seemed to the married lovers, by the thumping of their hearts. Then the dreaded voice boomed forth:
“Joshua Horrotian!”
“Here!” said the soldier, as if the roll were being called.
“Your miserable mother has a question to ask. Are you, the son I bore, a villain, or an honest man? Is this girl whom I have sheltered under my roof, and fed o’ my charity, a virtuous woman or a weak, to-yielding trollop?”
“I should ha’ knocked down the chap who’d asked me them two questions,” said Josh, turning a blazing crimson countenance, illumined with a pair of indignant candid eyes, upon the widow. “But I suppose, being my mother, and a professing Christian, it’s your privilege to think the worst o’ your own flesh and blood, no less than other folks. And so far as I can remember, you always have, I’ll say that for you! And though such usage goes far to the making of a decent young fellow into a villain and a blackguard as well, I am neither of these things, I declare before my Maker!” He added, with a clinching vigor that drove home belief in him: “And this young wife o’ mine is as clean of sin, if not as innocent—before Him I say it again!—as when she came into this charitable-thinking world a naked baby!”
The strangling sensation behind the leather stock had lessened, the ripe-tomato hue that had swamped Joshua Horrotian’s open, florid countenance had faded to a more normal tinting. The flaming sunset of the cold, clear evening showed up his stately height and vigorous handsome proportions to rare advantage. He was only a private trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, but in the eyes of the stern mother, whose love of him was intense in proportion to her rigorous concealment of it, no less than in those of his shy, worshiping wife, he seemed a king among men. But while the wife rejoiced in his beauty, his mother loathed it as a snare. She had nowords in which to hid the soldier take not the Holy Name in vain. She turned her hollow eyes away from him, lest she should offend the grim Moloch she worshiped by excess of pride in this perishable shape of clay, formed from her own body. And the resonant manly voice went on:
“Here’s the extent o’ my defaulter’s sheet where you’re concerned. I’ve married your milkmaid wi’out asking leave of you or anybody. Why? I’ll save you the trouble of asking the question I see on the end o’ your tongue. Because I love her and she me! Come here-along, my Pretty!”
He held out, with his dead father’s well-remembered gesture, the strong arm in the blue-cloth sleeve, and the masterful look of affection and the becoming air of pride he did this with, the widow of George Horrotian well knew. An insufferable pang pierced her when Nelly, with a little, eager cry, ran into the welcoming circle of the embrace. It closed upon the rounded waist as if it never meant to let go. And a spasm of rageful, despairing jealousy clutched Sarah as she saw; and her heart fluttered and clawed and pecked in her lean bosom like a starling burrowing in a crumbling wall. She closed her haggard eyes to shut out the sight of the hateful creature who had robbed her....
And yet, although she did not realize it, to the rigid woman who had yearned for a maid-child and been denied one, this creamy, rose-tinted, hazel-eyed orphan of a ruined farmer and his fagged-out young wife, was dear. Nelly had come into grim Sarah’s life too late to bring about a softening change in it, and garland it with flowers. Indeed, she shrank with loathing from the widow’s bony touch, and shivered with secret hatred at the sound of the railing voice that had driven her Josh from home before she knew him.... But such affection as Mrs. Horrotian had to spare from the son whom in her own characteristic and uncomfortable manner she idolized, was bestowed upon the girl who was now his wife.
Unimaginative as the woman was, her bitter love for both of them had brought its cruel gift of clairvoyance. The premonition of a growing tenderness between the two had sat by her sleepless pillow many a night past. The secret conviction that it was not to see his mother, but thisbright-eyed, silken-haired interloper, had made, for months past, a whispering-gallery of her poor tormented heart. She had been driven by the nagging dread, against her better nature, to favor Jason’s piggy wooing by tacit assent rather than by words....
And now—the thing she feared had come upon her. She was never, never to be beloved by her son as her great love deserved! and the girl she had taken in and protected had proved herself a traitress. For her she had no curse; but was not Scripture fruitful in denunciation of children who disavowed a parent’s right? And yet “a man shall quit his father and mother and cleave to his wife.” When she, the maid, Sarah Doddridge, daughter of a well-to-do yeoman-farmer of the county, had eloped with her penniless young lover, the couple had salved their smarting consciences with this text. Now, behold punishment meted out.... As she had served her mother, this son of her womb had served his.
Inexorable, awful justice of that grim idol her own imagination had made, set up on high, worshiped, and misnamed God! She weakened at the blow her memory dealt her. A harsh sound that was barely human came from her dry throat. She took hold of it as savagely as though it had been an enemy’s, and rocked upon her flat, slippered feet as she wrestled with herself. Her son and her son’s wife eyed her anxiously. They saw her moved in that strange inarticulate way, and a faint little hope awoke in both their hearts, and babbled that she might even melt and bless them—as parents, at first relentless, usually ended by doing in story-books and theater-plays.
But it was not to be. The bilious eye of the piggy man was upon the widow. And Jason, with extra garnishing of words, repeated that he was ready to go at Michaelmas. Such was his spirit, he added, that he’d be dalled if he served under a soger-master, on The Upper Clays or any other farm!
“Swear not!” trumpeted Sarah, turning her long chalk-white face and resentfully-flaming black eyes upon the factotum. She plucked herself from a brief descriptive verbal chart of the particular place in the Lake of Fire specially reserved for profane persons, to add:
“And as long as I am mistress at The Clays there can be no other voice in authority. While I choose, I rule!”
“Your soger son there says different,” proclaimed the piggy one. “A’s to be master heer, what time you buys ’n out o’ th’ Army, and then there’s noan on earth her’ll hang her pretty yead for....” He jerked a grimy stump of a thumb contemptuously towards Nelly. “Least of all mother-i’-laa, Widder Horrotian!”
“Mother!” broke out the soldier, controlling by a violent effort the urgent impulse to punch the speaker’s matted head, “will you let this mangy dog make bad blood between us? Something of what he was repeating I did say to my wife. But I’ll take my solemn oath, without a word disrespectful to you! You promised to buy me out of the Army, and let me manage the farm for you, and in the course of Nature—and may it be long a-coming!—a day ’ull dawn when I am master of The Clays. Then, as I hope my mother never has had or will have reason to be ashamed of me, so never may my wife. The words were harmless, twist ’em as the eavesdropper will. Upon my soul they were!”
Sarah swallowed something that might have been an iron choke-pear of the Middle Ages. She looked in her son’s hot blue eyes, and said with stern composure:
“Pledge not your soul to its undoing, though I dread it be lost a’ready. My father left this farm to me, to use at my discretion. ’Tis for me to decide when my son be fit to rule. Jason Digweed here were one of th’ witnesses to your grandfather’s Will. He made it his own self, without borrowing words from any man, an’ ’twas read out here, in th’ best parlor, by Lawyer Haycock, after the Funeral. Digweed remembers the wording, I’ll warrant. Speak out, Digweed. Prove to this undutiful and rebellious son that his mother does not lie!”
Thus adjured, Jason cleared his throat with a sound like the scraping of roads, and recited with relish:
“‘And I Leaves this ’eer Varm wi’ all of the ’Foresaid Messuages and Lands hadjoining and Distant To Sarah Ann Horrotian my Deer-Beloved Daughter Trusting to her Usings and Employings and Disposings of the Same For the Bennyfit of Her Lawful Son Joshua Who shall succeed to the Use and Enjoyment of the Property when in the Judgment of my aforesaid Daughter Sarah AnnHorrotian He shall Hev’ Attaindered to Years of Discretion.’”
“You hear?” said Sarah.
“Ay, I hear,” her son returned with bitterness. His chest heaved; his bright blue eyes burned reproachfully upon the haggard indomitable little woman in meager wincey brown.
“And I see, too,” he added, with a bleak smile that showed the sour woman’s portion in him, “as my mother is like to go back on her promise of buying me out of the Army, and setting me to manage the farm.”
“If so be as the Almighty can recall His word because rebellious creatures to whom His promise was given have backslidden and become perverted,” proclaimed Sarah, “His servant may do the same!”
“You pious folks have always th’ Bible to back ye,” said Josh bitterly, “when you’d wrong your neighbors—or betray your sons!”
“I betray no creature born. After such a down-bringing, paltry, miserable marriage as you ha’ made, do ye suppose I can answer to my departed father for your discretion? Back wi’ ye along to Barracks, and bide there! Discipline be the only rod for a stubborn nature such as yours. ‘Behold, in My love will I chasten you and will not refrain from scourging.’” She added, upon the heels of the text: “Nor shall a penny o’ my money go to buy you out o’ th’ Army. Selah!”
“You ... won’t ... buy me ... out?”
Sarah answered, in one short bark:
“No!”
He clenched his great fist and shouted:
“Who is the blackguard has egged ye on to this? Not—Jowell?”
Her stern conscience forbade her to deny the counsels of the Contractor. Yet, as a pious body of her type will, she evaded the answer direct:
“Mr.Jowell no more than yourself, that be gritting your teeth and clinching your fist at the mother that bore and suckled you.”
Involuntarily Josh’s eye went to the white-spouted brown earthenware teapot, that, as far back as he could remember, had sat in the middle of the second shelf of the oak-dresser when not in active use. The ghost of atwinkle flickered in his blue eye, the hovering shadow of a grin was on his solid countenance. He remembered the First Exodus and its cause. His mother may have read his thought. She said in clanging tones, as intolerable to her son’s hearing as though an iron tray were being beaten with a poker close to his ear:
“Was it my doing that you casted in your lot with the shedders of blood? No, but your own upping pride, and wicked stubbornness. Back wi’ ye to Barracks, and bide there! I ha’ got no more to say!”
The fleshy, red-whiskered face that aged and bleached under her indomitable regard sent strange shudders through her, in its likeness to the pinched, gray waxen mask she had kissed upon the stiff-frilled pillow of her husband’s death-bed. From the mouth that had straightened into a pale line under the flaming mustache came words, uttered in the very tones of the dying:
“And my wife?”
The broad hand shook that spread itself protectingly over the little brown head that shed its wealth of dark silken ringlets upon Josh’s stalwart chest. A voice came from their ambush; no frightened whimper, but a clear and resolute utterance:
“Her goes wi’ her own dear husband, as a wife ought!”
He groaned, forgetful of the triumphing Digweed, and the hard black eyes of his listening mother....
“My girl, my girl! you don’t know what you be talking about, or what kind o’ women you would have to live alongside.”
Nelly lifted her cheek from the blue coat it nestled to, and met his look. Perhaps, if you had seen the quivering of the short upper-lip with the golden dust of freckles on it, and the brave way in which the hazel eyes laughed through a veil of tears, and the twisting of the pink fingers shyly interlacing upon her apron-band, you would have loved her nearly as much as Josh did.
“They would be soldiers’ wives, like I be myself, dear heart.”
“But what soldiers’ wives, my girl! Trollops and jades many o’ them, married in a moment of drunkenness. Honest women the rest; decent enough, but rough as hemp. And using language, the best o’ them, such as ’ud scald these little ears to hear!...”
A sob broke from him with the bitter cry:
“Mother, you’ll never deny my wife a shelter in the house where my dead father lived with you in love?”
Said Sarah, upright as a ramrod and grim as a steam-hammer:
“I ha’ not gone to say as far.”
With his manhood melting in him to the point of tears as he gave back the faithful look of the dark eyes that wooed his, he stammered:
“God bless you for that!”
“But,” said Sarah, grimmer than ever, for the pink fingers had tapped his lips, and he had pecked a passing kiss on them, “as she has earned her dole of food and her penny of wages with service here, so she shall continue to do. I keep no idlers, nor shall!”
“Nor were asked to, I reckon!”
From the safe rampart of the blue cloth hug Nelly launched with the words a bright eye-dart of defiance. Sarah thundered in reply:
“Young woman, check your tongue!” She added, with an afterthought of precaution: “And show me your marriage-lines.”
“My lines?...”
The trooper said, in answer to the puzzled knitting of the girl’s soft eyebrows:
“The paper the parson as married us ’scribed out and gave ye, Pretty.... The certificate of our marriage ’twas. The wife always keeps that!” He added, dipping his tongue in salt pickle saved over from a brief experience of the lower troop-deck: “’Tis our cable and sheet-anchor both in the stiff gale we’re weathering. Out with it, my girl!”
He looked to see her take it from the darling fastness of her bosom. A hand fluttered there, then dropped. The irises of the hazel eyes usurped the golden-brown-gray until they seemed all black.... A frightened voice said:
“Why ... I mind you taking o’ that paper to keep for me....”
“Nonsense!” he broke out, so roughly that Nelly winced, and faltered:
“But indeed and ’deed ’tis true!... Pray do, do remember! Think how I had no pocket to my gown, havingmade ’n on the sly in such a hurry as never, up to th’ garret where I sleep, working by the light of saved-up dip-ends hours after your mother had took th’ flat candle-stick away....”
Sarah’s gloomy front contracted ominously. Were not those dip-ends filched? Nelly went on, appealing to her moody, frowning lord:
“I were for putting the paper in my bosom.... ’Twas you said ‘Nay’ to that! So you took un and put ’n in th’ pocket o’ your pants.”
“That I never!... Stop, though!...”
His mouth primmed itself into a whistle of dismay, so ludicrous that Nelly tittered through her tears. He felt in the single pocket permitted by Government, patted himself all over the blue covering of his big chest and solid ribs in the hope of drawing forth a paper crackle, finally bellowed with the full strength of his vast lungs:
“Right, by the Lord Harry! So I did; there’s no denying!”
His eyes grew circular and bulging, his healthy, florid, intelligent countenance was stricken into the very idiocy of consternation, his bushy flaming whiskers seemed to droop, grow limp, and fade in color as he stuttered:
“And never thought about it after or since!... And the chap belonging to the Rifle Corps—that lent me the plain-clothes suit—if you can tack on ‘plain’ to a chessboard check in half-a-dozen colors—it being as many sizes too big for him! offered me the togs as a bargain, him being ordered out to Bermuda on Foreign Service.... And I hadn’t the money—and he sold the chessboards to a Jew.... Whew! My eye and Betty Martin!... Who’s got those pants on now?”
“Then,” said his mother, in tones that cut like broken ice-edges, “you that are a married couple have no lines to show me?” She paused and delivered sentence, woman-like wreaking vengeance first upon the daughter of Eve....
“You poor, to-yielding wench, this man has deceived and ruined ’e! A woman without her marriage-lines be no wife at all!”